According to a commentator, TERFs lobbied UK Gov to stop companies from building gender neutral toilets

The full comment was this:

The TERFs successfully lobbied the previous government to make exclusively gender neutral toilets illegal under Part T of the building code. Because exclusively gender neutral toilets don’t discriminate against anybody and would therefore be acceptable to trans people and if the TERFs went dishonest far-right cranks, it would have presumably been on with them too, and it would have ended the culture war. That’s why they had them banned, because it wasn’t about toilets, changing rooms or sports, it was about keeping the culture war going to make life impossible for trans people.

So this is not just a clerical ramification, but a genocidal move. See my other comment.

For all the talking heads still “asking questions” and demonstrating absolute ignorance, if not bad faith, after all these years, here are some very tangible takes as to why bathroom bans means genocide.

If people are to use exclusively the restrooms that match their assigned at birth sex, then all people must be the sex that they are perceived to be. Trans advocates were not paranoid enough to imagine that the right wants to wipe trans people out of public life to such a degree, that no ambiguity about a person’s sex can further be possible, except for those “extremely rare genetic accidents” Ben Shapiro keeps talking about. Public erasure, however, of transgender and gender-nonconforming people amounts to the enforcement of cisgenderism by a state that defines sex as a natural binary with no exceptions, and no behavioral, nor performative, nor psychological deviations from the norm. (From my previous essay on this.)

The rest of this post comes from the real experts on the topic, the Lemkin institute for genocide prevention.

1

Statement on the Genocidal Nature of the Gender Critical Movement’s Ideology and Practice

Genocidal ideologies are ideologies that deny or seek to erase the existence of a specific group because of the supposed threat it poses to the holders of the ideology.

Focusing primarily on the imagined threat posed by transgender women, gender critical ideologues believe that transgender women are in fact men who are seeking to dominate cisgender women (women whose sense of self corresponds with their birth sex) by impersonating them and thereby gaining access to women’s bathrooms, women’s locker rooms, women’s sports teams, and other women’s spaces.

Transgender women are represented as stealth border crossers who seek to defile the purity of cisgender women, much as Tutsi women were viewed in Hutu Power ideology and Jewish men in Nazi antisemitism.

Like the religious targets of genocidal violence, trans people are often described as somehow polluted, sinful, or against God.

A fundamentalist gender binary was a key feature of Nazi racial politics and genocide.

2

Red Flag Alert on Anti-Trans and Intersex Rights in the UK

Since the ruling, “birth sex,” “biological sex,” and “natal sex” have all been used interchangeably, ignoring the multiple relevant components of biological sex and the existence of intersex people. Analysts immediately warned that the decision could be used to render single sex spaces off limits for trans people, including hospital wards, sports, and domestic violence shelters. For a group especially vulnerable to domestic violence, exclusion from specialised shelters is nothing short of cruel and could, in some cases, prove a death sentence. Transgender and intersex people may find themselves excluded not only from spaces of their current sex but also from spaces for their sex assigned at birth. Trans men would find themselves excluded from both male spaces on the basis of their assigned sex at birth, and female spaces if they are deemed to look too much like men.

The EHRC has, in the past few years, seemed to become a lobby group for erasing the rights of intersex and trans people on the basis of gender critical views. This has been explicitly confirmed by leader of the UK’s Official Opposition Kemi Badenoch. Following the UKSC Ruling, the EHRC erased decades of established practice protecting transgender and intersex people by taking a restrictive interpretation of the ruling in their interim guidance and refusing to consider the welfare of intersex or transgender people. The guidance dictates that anyone who is not binarily male or female is excluded from single sex spaces, ranging from public toilets to groups such as a single-gender choir. This interim guidance has been noted by the Good Law Project to be either wrong in law or a breach of human rights.

Those who have transitioned will be forced to choose between being someone who is either excluded from society or who lives a criminalised life shrouded in secrecy. If the law in the UK makes people living beyond sex and gender binaries second-class citizens, it will also lay the groundwork for increased genital mutilation of intersex infants and conversion therapy of transgender people.

All of the actions described above fit neatly into the 9th Pattern of Genocide: “Denial and/or Prevention of Identity.” As we have repeatedly stated over the years, genocide does not only manifest in the killing of an entire group. In the case of trans and intersex people, genocide is often perpetrated by making it impossible for individuals to exist as their true selves.

3

Red Flag Alert for Genocide - USA

An apparently committed transphobe like Knowles may believe that transgender people are not real and are instead misled by something called “transgenderism,” so that by eradicating “transgenderism” he would not be eradicating a real identity. To that line of thought we can only note that the arrogance of determining which identities are real and not real, and therefore which identities can be slated for elimination, is already a giant step in the direction of genocide. Moreover, once an identity is determined to be illegitimate, criminal, and threatening, the killing of people with that identity is never far behind.

The Lemkin Institute reminds American voters and legislators that “the gender critical movement is a totalitarian and genocidal social force that targets not just transgender people, but also all the institutions of democracy that protect individual and collective human rights,”

Anti-trans legislation, anti-trans organizations, and the anti-trans movement must be fought forcefully in the name of saving lives as well as securing democratic institutions from the accelerating threat of fascism in the United States.

4

Red Flag Alert 2 for the Anti-Trans Agenda of the Trump Administration in the United States

The anti-trans movement in the US has made it clear that it will not stop at banning gender affirming care for children. Emboldened by this Supreme Court decision, they will continue their attempts to restrict gender affirming care for adults as well. Furthermore, they will ramp up their attempts to erase trans identity through various non-medical policies, including bathroom bans, bans on conversations related to gender in schools, preventing schools and workplaces from using pronouns or names that don’t align with a person’s sex at birth, banning trans athletes from competition, and criminalizing dressing as a gender other than the one assigned at birth.

The Lemkin Institute reminds people that the genocidal process involves far more than just mass murder. Most genocidal processes involve complex policies aimed at actively and systematically obstructing an identity from manifesting itself within the social world through laws, decrees, speech acts, and practices enacted by groups in power. As a result of these acts, people within a threatened community cannot live publicly as who they are and community identity development becomes impossible.

Given that leaders in the anti-trans movement view trans people as internal enemies and U.S. President Donald Trump has identified them a national security threat, the recent Supreme Court decision can be seen as part of a much larger internal cleansing operation aimed at creating a white, heterosexual, cisgender ethnostate

Is this …conjecture? I will make two points.

1. They might want to market the phones to security-minded people, say the banking sector, governments, etc. They have the funds to spend and have high stakes.
2. GrapheneOS as it is now already gets flack for supposed backdoors in Pixels. The common response to that is that independent audits have shown that GrapheneOS phones are resistant to common penetration and surveillance attacks. No matter the hardware, independent audits are what makes people trust GrapheneOS. If future audits revise that trust, the community will just move forward.

The ambitiousness and “in-your-face” qualities of this project are to my liking. On the other hand, I can’t see serious applications.

Identity documents are mostly based on the trust projected on the issuing authority. The current approach is to seek alternatives with blockchains, commonly called digital identity. The EU is currently seeking a similar solution, with a sovereign blockchain infrastructure called EBSI.

Of course this does not solve most of the real and serious problems with identity documents. People without formal identification is an ongoing crisis in many countries. The author also makes good points about abusive parents one might want to disassociate from. But issuing your own identity does not solve these problems.

The key difference is the web of trust implied in each case. State entities trust other state entities about these documents, and they can use their infrastructure to tokenize this trust. It was never about the document itself.

But building an alternative web of trust? This goes solidly into crypto territory, and it will never catch up due to the connotations. Now, if the issuing authority was a federation of worker councils, that would be a different story.

Genuinely, I had a look at the source code and I could not get your gist. How can you tell?

Curiously enough, for years and years the main criticism of GrapheneOS is that it only runs on Google Pixel phones. Finally, they announce they will work with another provider, Motorola. Some people proceed to simply forecast enshitification, spyware, and ads. I don’t think this is sane at all.

I read this title 5 times before parsing it properly.

is simply the word for rooster (male chicken).

As is in English?

Knuth’s book states plainly that the X sounds like the ‘ch’ in the Scottish word “Loch”. (Or the ‘h’ in hawk-tua for more modern readers.)

Indeed, the rate of democratic backsliding is considered to be fast, compared to other countries. Below I include some links and quotes. What I really wanted to say is that the resistance is too mild, and too slow. Also, you know that book “On Tyranny”? Very relevant under the circumstances.

We are sliding towards an illiberal democracy. The phrase, first popularized in the 1990s, took on new urgency in the United States as major figures in Donald Trump’s orbit came to view Viktor Orbán as a leadership role model. As Bill Kristol posted, “ABC’s settlement with Trump feels like it could be an inflection point in the Orbanization of our politics.” To be clear, the United States is not yet an illiberal democracy, but the movement towards it has accelerated in the weeks since the election. What is most disturbing is that Trump has not yet even taken power. https://www.democracydocket.com/opinion/we-are-on-our-own/ (2024-12-22)

The scary thing is that I’ve watched a Trump/Musk style takeover of the government in my home country of Hungary a long time ago and it went great for them. Turns out the general population accepted every institution being gutted and stripped in obviously corrupt ways. They were simply distracted by a constant stream of culture war shit which normal people cared more about than institutional change, and those who did look thought “the boys are fixing the system” or “it was corrupt anyway”. https://mas.to/@Techaltar/113943270068786481 (2025-02-04)

In the last few days alone, Trump has smashed past several new milestones. He’s just called his predecessor’s pardons void and vacated. He gave a bitterly partisan speech at the Department of Justice, demanding the prosecution of the media and certain adversaries. He threatened numerous universities with sanctions. He invoked a 227-year-old war measures law during peacetime — for the first time ever — to deport accused gang members without due process. And, most importantly, when that deportation plan wound up in court, he may have — although it’s still in dispute — defied a court order, cracking the ultimate constitutional safeguard. It’s not just the scope of what Trump’s done that has Lindberg envisioning the once-unthinkable: removing the U.S. from the democratic list and shifting it to the second-lowest tier among five, to a so-called electoral autocracy. It’s also the speed. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-democracy-report-1.7486317 (2025-03-18)

By the time we left in late 2004, Moscow had been transformed. People who had happily talked with us at the start were now afraid to return our calls. “Now I have this fear all the time,” one told us at the time. There is a similar chill now in Washington. Every day someone who used to feel free to speak publicly against Mr. Trump says they will no longer let journalists quote them by name for fear of repercussions, both Democrats and Republicans. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/us/politics/trump-putin-russia.html (2025-02-26)

Yet another report out Thursday from Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based democracy think-tank, said that among free countries, the U.S. joined Bulgaria and Italy in registering the largest declines in political rights and civil liberties last year. “The developments in the United States are moving towards dictatorship, what the founders wanted to avoid,” said Staffan Lindberg, the V-Dem Institute’s founding director, who spent seven years in the U.S. “It’s the most rapid decline ever in the history of the United States and one of the most rapid in the world.” V-Dem stands for Varieties of Democracy. More than 4,000 scholars contributed data to the report, which is the largest of its kind. https://www.npr.org/2026/03/20/nx-s1-5754021/trump-democracy-autocracy-dictatorship-reports

And this complementary piece, for no reason whatsoever.

How Hitler Dismantled a Democracy in 53 Days - He used the constitution to shatter the constitution. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/hitler-germany-constitution-authoritarianism/681233/

He feels safe enough to utter that shit. If only the left had a fraction of the right-wing propaganda apparatus. There should be three times the January 6 crowd taking him straight to the scaffold. Yet here we are watching a fascist dystopia installing itself, in slow motion.

Thanks for the tip, but I would appreciate if you actually read the post. TL;DR I do mention its Nazi issue.

The legal scholars at Heritage Foundation give me the creeps more than their ICE stormtroopers. They exploit the very concepts they despise, in order to criminalize supporters of human rights. For example, transgender inclusion in high school sports? Title IX violation. Affirmative action? Selective bias against white men. Undercover informants in the Proud Boys? Supporting hate-groups. When they themselves do not consider them to be hate groups. This really grinds my gears with these fascists.

Speaking of undercover informants

Anyhow, this is gonna play out in court. Given that not all federal judges have capitulated to the White Supremacist’s House it can go both ways. It is actually a good reminder to donate to them (I have been procrastinating…)

Hey, not two days ago someone said that connections between Peter Thiel and age verification was a “conspiracy theory”. Apart from the above link, the article states:

And as these mandates create a captive market worth billions of dollars, a whole ecosystem of venture-backed “identity-as-a-service” startups has sprung up to serve it. Persona, valued at $2 billion and backed by Peter Thiel’s investment network, is just one of many.

Unrelated to the above, but I like the wording too much:

“Child safety” has simply become the marketing department for a rent-seeking surveillance industry.

A note on the US v EU thing

Is this an US-only thing? There are several articles over the past few months hinting at US Big-Tech lobbying efforts in the EU. Thiel makes a living as a contractor of the surveillance apparatus. It is only in his interest to expand his business in the highly regulated EU, and I have not even started on his Dark Enlightment politics.

von der Leyen has no spine in this, if she isn’t actively complicit.

Let’s say this is the official narrative. My argument:

1. Meta stands to consolidate power and revenue from further mapping devices to real people.
2. Meta was also originally backed by Peter Thiel, who trades in data mining for secret services, now much more energetically. Zuckerberg is a sexist idiot and his app had no more merit than MySpace. Thiel saw the potential of mapping real idenities to online behavior, and it is no accident Palantir was later implicated in Cambridge Analytica.
3. A redditor came up with concrete data that others have already posted, that show that Meta’s dark money are all over this case. As for the fine you say that completely explains this, is a very modest for Meta, who is used to pay such fines as a cost of doing business.
4. Amongst the orgs taking Meta’s money to push this are many conservative organizations, like Heritage but also others (anti-sex, anti-abortion, and anti-trans organizations), who know that these laws will effectively suppress speech. Much like the trans moral panics, the laws are not as stupid as they appear, but carefully designed to obliquely achieve their goals (e.g. police bodies with wombs, in line with the same orgs’ anti-abortion positions).
5. Governments watch closely as the new corporatist technofascism undoes regulations and checks and balances. They stand to gain from the turmoil and increase their surveillance capabilities even more. Alternatively, some EU goverments might be thinking that this is a way to stick it to US tech monopolies that brainwash their constituents, but they are wrong.
6. In fact, the approach and outcomes hints toward government contractors in cahoots with surveillance agencies, that it would be surprising if there is no adjacency to Analytica personnel and/or the benefits for state actors and spooks are just an unplanned side-effect.

Conclusion: There is sufficient basis to consider that the official narrative is not the whole story.

They’ve already decided so. It is all in Project 2025: queerness and sex-ed are considered pornographic. And platforms have been preemptively demonetizing and censoring info for similar topics (abortion and sex-workers resources also) for years.

This is a cool way to protect a belief, narrowing the scope so that the refuting data do not apply anymore. Perhaps I can write a fucking essay about it, but do you have data to support this narrowing move? There is like a ton of data that the West has been invasively spying of possible threats to the status quo (from Cointelpro to undercover UK cops like recently), not just people “acting on it”. Furthermore, actions can fall under protected free speech as well, like putting up a poster, demonstrating, and protesting. So your proposal is inherently undemocratic if you roll back freedom to only protect oral expression, quite similar to a “Don’t ask don’t tell” attitude towards gay people. What you just said is simply counter-factual. Blanket surveillance is a staple of Western societies in the 21st century, and it blows my mind that there are still people oblivious to what is more or less spelled out clearly in the Patriot Act and all laws modeled after it across the globe.